When Elinor Carucci gave birth to her twins, she discovered the highs and lows that are part of every new mother’s experience. A noted photographer accustomed to documenting intimate moments, Carucci used her camera to deal with the maelstrom of emotions. She followed her babies as they grew into toddlers, then children, with their own complex relationships.

Carucci’s dramatic use of light and shadow and her uncanny ability to capture the freedom with which children express themselves imbue her images with a marvelous clarity. By turns touching, surprising, sensual, joyful, and unflinching, these striking pictures convey moments that are at once personal and universal—a child’s runny nose, a fight between brother and sister, a fast-food meal, a warm embrace, a sleepless night, an ice cream cone.

The result, as Francine Prose remarks in her foreword, are images that “seem new, no matter how well we may think we know . . . the experiences and feelings they depict. . . . Nothing, we feel, is left out.”